


A Bit Of A Core Dump About Sherlock Holmes and Women

by PlaidAdder



Series: Sherlock Meta [14]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Book: The Sign of the Four, M/M, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-20 01:29:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18982420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: Nonfiction. What it says on the tin: One day, I decided to just unload my take on Sherlock Holmes's relations with the fair sex in ACD canon. Basically, my take is that despite what Watson tells you and what Holmes occasionally says himself, Holmes does not actually "dislike" women. In fact, his willingness to adopt the role of male protector for women who don't have anyone who can fill that role is part of his appeal, then and now. But it's also important to his appeal that he doesn'tlikewomen...in THAT WAY.





	A Bit Of A Core Dump About Sherlock Holmes and Women

I have concluded that of the lies Watson tells about Sherlock Holmes and his feelings, the ones about what Holmes really thinks of women are among the biggest.

Below the cut tag, I will go on about why and what that means.

So in  _Sign of Four_ , after Mary Morstan’s first visit to 221b, this conversation happens:

**“What a very attractive woman!” I exclaimed, turning to my companion.**

**He had lit his pipe again and was leaning back with drooping eyelids. “Is she?” he said languidly; “I did not observe.”**

**“You really are an automaton – a calculating machine,” I cried. “There is something positively inhuman in you at times.”**

**He smiled gently.**

**“It is of the first importance,” he cried, “not to allow your judgment to be biased by personal qualities. A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem. The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.”**

So a few things about this: 

First, the fact that Doyle chooses to establish Holmes’s superiority to mere “emotion” by establishing that he is not impressed by Mary Morstan’s physical charms tells you something about how terrified men are of their own sex drives. Over and over again, in detective fiction but also in other genres, we are constantly told that sexual attraction is utterly incompatible with the function of reason or judgment, and shown that one of the biggest and noblest struggles a hero can have is the struggle to stop his attraction to a woman from leading him to make mistakes or become corrupted or commit crimes. Holmes’s apparently complete indifference to Mary Morstan’s beauty is used to demonstrate what an exceptional man he is–someone whose predilection for reason over passion is SO rare that it makes him “positively inhuman.” 

Second, what Holmes says about how the most winning woman he ever knew was a poisoner, and the most repellent man he knows is a philanthropist? OK if you say so, Holmes; but in Doyle’s universe, it almost never actually works that way. In general, in the Sherlock Holmesiverse, villains are physically repellent in some way–Tonga is a particularly extreme example, but if you look at the physical descriptions of Roylott, Rucastle, Milverton, Tregennis, et al., you will see the marks of evil. Doyle was evidently pretty strongly influenced by Victorian ideas about physiognomy. You will have occasional exceptions, like Latimer from “Greek Interpreter,” but most of the time in this fictional universe, ugly on the inside=ugly on the outside. If you are thinking, “wow, that’s really ableist,” well, you are correct, and there is even more bad news for you on that front in stories like “Sussex Vampire” and “Retired Colourman,” where disability is not only a marker of the villain’s criminality but his primary motive for committing the crime.

Conversely, in the Holmes canon, beautiful women are almost never evil. You have to get pretty deep into the catalogue before you find the exceptions. Prior to the 1920s, when women become criminals in the Holmes stories, it’s usually because they have first been hurt by a man. Irene Adler, for instance, is a blackmailer, but the resolution of “Scandal in Bohemia” makes it clear that she was acting in self defense. Mary Holder from “Beryl Coronet” does betray her uncle by helping Sir George Burnwell steal the coronet; but Holmes doesn’t blame Mary for falling prey to him:  **“He is one of the most dangerous men in England—a ruined gambler, an absolutely desperate villain, a man without heart or conscience. Your niece knew nothing of such men. When he breathed his vows to her, as he had done to a hundred before her, she flattered herself that she alone had touched his heart.”** Rachel Howells, in “Musgrave Ritual,” kills Brunton in kind of a horrible way, but only after he has sexually betrayed her and then tried to exploit her again. Holmes is very severe with Lady Brackenstall from “Abbey Grange” when she refuses to admit that she’s lying to him; but it turns out that once again she is really the victim of her alcoholic and abusive husband, and Holmes’s decision to let Captain Crocker go basically affirms her willingness to lie to protect him. Whoever the woman is who shoots Charles Augustus Milverton, Holmes is 1000% on her side: he abets the murder, destroys incriminating evidence, and refuses to let Lestrade know that he has identified her. 

I could go on, but basically the only presumably attractive woman in the pre- _Case-Book_  canon who is represented as a truly nasty piece of work is Sarah Cushing from “The Cardboard Box,” and (significantly, I think) Holmes never interacts with her. It’s not until the 1920s that you start to see Holmes going up against beautiful women with evil hearts, and there’s only two: Mrs. Gibson from “Thor Bridge” and Isadora Klein from “Three Gables.” 

In fact, throughout the saga, for a guy who is supposed to have a low opinion of women, Holmes spends an awful lot of time helping them. It’s true that in “A Case of Identity,” Holmes doesn’t treat his client, Mary Sutherland, very well; he solves the mystery but doesn’t tell her about it, claiming she wouldn’t believe him. He does, however, threaten to literally scourge the perpetrator:

**“The law cannot, as you say, touch you,” said Holmes, unlocking and throwing open the door, “yet there never was a man who deserved punishment more. If the young lady has a brother or a friend, he ought to lay a whip across your shoulders. By Jove!” he continued, flushing up at the sight of the bitter sneer upon the man’s face, “it is not part of my duties to my client, but here’s a hunting crop handy, and I think I shall just treat myself to–” He took two swift steps to the whip, but before he could grasp it there was a wild clatter of steps upon the stairs, the heavy hall door banged, and from the window we could see Mr. James Windibank running at the top of his speed down the road.**

**“There’s a cold-blooded scoundrel!” said Holmes, laughing, as he threw himself down into his chair once more. “That fellow will rise from crime to crime until he does something very bad, and ends on a gallows. The case has, in some respects, been not entirely devoid of interest.”**

And this is actually the role that Holmes finds himself in, vis a vis women, much of the time: as the surrogate “brother” or “friend” of a young, vulnerable woman who doesn’t have any other male protectors, or who is being preyed on by men who  _should_  be her male protectors. You can read sexism on Doyle’s part into this and I wouldn’t argue with you; but the fact remains that if you look at Holmes’s interactions with individual women, you don’t see a lot of evidence of the dislike and distrust of women that Watson keeps attributing to him. In fact, Watson more or less admits this in the introduction to “Dying Detective”:   **“[Mrs. Hudson] was fond of him, too, for he had a remarkable gentleness and courtesy in his dealings with women. He disliked and distrusted the sex, but he was always a chivalrous opponent.”**

So why go on insisting on this “dislike” and “distrust” of women, right to the end of the saga, when Holmes’s actual behavior and Doyle’s characterizations of women so seldom bear that out? Well:

1) This all makes sense if you assume that when Watson says Holmes “dislikes” women, what he really means is that Holmes is not sexually attracted to them. If you interpret it that way, the contradiction vanishes.

2) In fact, if we posit that Doyle shares his culture’s attitudes about sexuality, the fact that Holmes is not sexually attracted to women  **is actually extremely important to his function as their protector.** In a culture that views male sexual desire as always trouble and often uncontrollable, it’s easier to accept the unmarried, drug-addicted, and in other ways quite irregular and not entirely respectable Holmes as a disinterested and trustworthy protector of women if he has no sexual interest in them and therefore no temptation to prey upon them.

3) Framing this disinterest as “dislike” allows Watson (and Doyle) to present this sexual indifference to women as a function of misogyny rather than evidence of homosexuality. Which, in a society that had outlawed male homosexuality, was something Doyle had quite an interest in doing–especially after 1895, when Wilde’s  _Picture of Dorian Gray_ was literally used against him in court.

Anyway. That is my core dump. Behold it.


End file.
